Trauma Sensitive Yoga Project, LLC

10/07/2025

One thing that yoga can offer us is a way of coming to our center. What does this mean?

🌟 Centering is a process that brings awareness in your mind and body. Awareness puts some space between your consciousness and your thoughts and emotions. It's sometimes called conscious awareness, or mindfulness. It's like taking step back to observe your thoughts, emotions, and breath, rather than being attached to them. This is both a practice and a skill. It is quite difficult to do at first, but it does get easier over time. Once you gain more awareness of your thoughts and emotions, you can then gain more control over them.

🌟 There might be times when reaching a center might feel impossible, and that's okay, I want to normalize that feeling. If that's where you're at, you are not alone. There can be acceptance in this. It's accepting all parts of yourself. If there's a part of yourself that feels like you can't accept yourself, you're invited to accept that part, too. A lot of this practice is learning not to abandon ourselves. It's Presence. Connection.

🧘🏼‍♀️ The Practice: 🧘🏼‍♀️

✨ We can start by noticing, or becoming aware of, our external environment. We might look around, notice what we can see... hear... smell... and taste. You're welcome to stay there and practice the awareness of something more external. If you want, you can start to bring your awareness to internal sensations, noticing what you can feel. That might be the felt sense of your body on the mat or the chair. You might notice the felt sense of your breath, the sensation of the air coming in through the nostrils, and back out.

✨ You can then imagine a line through the midline through the trunk of your body, a center axis, like a channel that runs from the base of your spine up through the crown of your head. You might shift from side to side to slowly start to come into it. You might bring your hands to your midline in a prayer gesture to help ground you into that center. You're welcome to breathe into it. Maybe your inhale starts at the base of your spine and rises up to the top, then maybe your exhale starts at the top and then flows into the bottom. Pausing there, and noticing. Where is your center? Do you feel connected to it or distant from it, or are you still searching for it? What's it like?

08/04/2025

I've completed the master's portion of my program and have begun to focus on the Yoga Therapy portion of it. I'm currently taking the Advanced Teaching Skills training, which began by asking us to write our own definition of yoga. I wanted to share with you what I wrote. I don't feel this is a complete definition, as Yoga is a very ancient and complex practice that involves many different things for many different people. A complete definition would require an entire book to explain in its entirety. But as a simple explanation of what it means to me, I wanted to share.

Yoga is a holistic practice that works with all aspects of the human experience. It is a practice of embodied connection. It works individually and with the integration of mind, heart, body, soul, energy, and spirit. It is a spiritual practice, in that it is a practice of coming together with Source or Spirit. It is a practice that can help guide the soul along its journey. It is a practice that helps us understand and work with our own energetic qualities. It strengthens the body and improves flexibility and balance. It can heal and open the heart. And it can help us gain control of our thoughts. It is a practice toward unity and liberation. This is a life-long practice of transformation, from where we can reconnect to our center and find our ground. It is from that ground and that center from which we learn how to show up in the world. For others, and for ourselves.

I'd love to hear what your definition of yoga is! Comment below!

05/23/2025

Thanks to Voyage Ohio for featuring me in their magazine!

Today we’d like to introduce you to Erin Finck. Hi Erin, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?Hello, I think this is asking more about my personal story rather than the story of my trainings and the like, so here it is: I’ve been interested in […]

03/20/2025

This is most of the paper I wrote for my Consciousness Studies class. It looks at the relatinship between meditation and mental health, adverse effects of meditation, and how to navigate those adverse effects. 🧎

It is generally accepted that mindfulness and other types of meditation can be beneficial toward improving one’s mental wellbeing, but more information could be helpful in determining best practices for people who are living with mental health (MH) conditions, especially as it relates to adverse ....

01/27/2025

I've compiled a list of local resources for anyone who needs them, or anyone who wants to get involved with some of these causes. If you know of any other resources that you'd like to have added to this list, please let me know. 🙏🏼

Sometimes during the practice of yoga, things can come up, we might feel sensitive from the experience. I am available through email, phone, or in-person to speak of the experience of yoga, however, I am not a licensed mental health practitioner. Trauma Center - Trauma Sensitive Yoga (TCTSY) is a...

01/11/2025

If you are thinking of starting a yoga practice, but could use a few more reasons, here are 15 of them to help you decide. ☺️

Improved strength and flexibility are not the only benefits to maintaining a yoga practice. Here are 15 benefits of yoga that apply to children, teens, and adults: Body awareness and connection to body - Embodiment is the experience of being in our body. There are so many things in our culture t...

12/05/2024

Source: Bhargav et. al., 2023

09/21/2024

Essentially, our interception (internal cues) is influenced by our exteroception (external cues) and vice versa. Now consider how both of these interrelate with proprioception (our perception of where our bodies are in space and what our bodies are doing in the world). Consider how these factors - exteroception, interception, and proprioception - influence our identity, sense of self, experience of "belonging" and how we behave and relate with others. Having a strong sense of self governs self-awareness, self-reflection, and self-regulation. -- Hardy, 2023.

🗣️ Trauma is an injury to our sense of who we are. Our ability to understand who that is and what that person needs becomes damaged when we are constantly trying to protect ourselves, especially during the pivotal periods of brain development (during childhood).

🫂 Yoga can help us repair the systems of exteroception, interception, and proprioception. The more we practice activities that utilize our sense receptors, the stronger those systems get, and we become better at interpreting what those signals mean. These systems not only help us with things like balance and spatial awareness, but they are related to the very core of our being and our human experience.

08/19/2024

At the time of observation, mind is not an entity which exists independently, outside of your breathing and your body. The boundary between the subject of observation and the object of observation no longer exists. We observe "the body in the body."

- Sutra on the Full Awareness of Breathing

08/08/2024

Learning to welcome our emotions as messengers is so important in terms of healing the body-mind from trauma. This is a process of reconnecting the mind with the body.

07/29/2024

While our yoga practice can help us undo or re-learn patterns of holding in our body, we may also need to determine the function that these patterns are serving.

Is the tension providing us a sense of support that we are unable to find in our life? Is it allowing us to feel a sense of control or establish a grip on our life that we are otherwise unable to create? Is it our own way of holding ourselves?

What are we holding on to, and why?

Relaxation may not feel sustainable (and may not even be appropriate) until we can provide a steady foundation with which we can relax IN. This is one reason why we aim to create stability with our asana practice before we begin to explore softness. The practice that we engage in on our mat can then be extended into our lives off of the mat. Slowly, steadily, and with ease. 🙏🏼

07/23/2024

Unconscious restrictions anywhere in the body related to breath narrows our world and reduces our capacity to feel difficult as well as pleasurable feelings. The function of the narrowed breath is to bind the anxiety associated with expanding the breath.

Adults tend to have disturbed breathing patterns because of chronic muscular tensions that distort and limit their breathing. These tensions are a result of emotional conflicts. Babies and animals breathe naturally, through their abdomen. Adults develop pathological breathing patterns that leave them in a chronic state of fight-or-flight.

One's breathing style can also be what Willhelm Reich called "character armor": a physical manifestation of psychological protection. This armor helped us cope with our world as children but limits our expressiveness in adulthood, providing an unconscious and unnecessary "protection." The breath is restrained, the muscles are contracted, and this leads to more and more problems, both physically and emotionally.

Breathwork allows us to learn new ways of breathing, develop more natural and healthy ways of breathing, restores healthy functioning of our nervous system, and provides us with invaluable tools for navigating stressful situations.

Source: Mijares, 2009